In Chapter 8 of The Language Animal, Charles Taylor claims that narratives are unsubstitutable for an appropriate understanding of social life and ‘human affairs’ in general. In order to identify open questions in his argumentation as well as unwanted consequences of his outlook, I proceed in three consecutive steps. I first problematize Taylor’s distinction between laws and stories, then go on to address his intentional blurring of stories and histories, and finally suggest that the concept of genealogy might be a (...) promising candidate for describing Taylor’s approach, concluding that he implicitly forms the equation: narrative equals history equals critique. (shrink)

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. It features eleven essays on scientific objectivity from a variety of perspectives, including philosophy of science, history of science, and feminist philosophy. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities. Taken individually, the essays supply new methodological tools for theorizing what is valuable in the pursuit (...) of objective knowledge and for investigating its history. The essays offer many starting points, while suggesting new avenues of research. Taken collectively, the essays exemplify the very virtues of objectivity that they theorize—in reading them together, the reader can sense various anxieties about the dangerously subjective in our age and locate commonalities of concern as well as differences of approach. As a result, the volume offers an expansive vision of a research community seeking a communal understanding of its own methods and its own epistemic anxieties, struggling to enunciate the key problems of knowledge of our time and offer insight into how to overcome them. -/- (Contributors: Alex Csiszar, Scott Edgar, Peter Galison, Ian Hacking, Sandra Harding, Moira Howes, Paolo Savoia, Judy Segal, Joan Steigerwald, and Alison Wylie). (shrink)

In my paper, I set The Language Animal against a broader picture of Taylor’s intellectual trajectory. Sources of the Self (1989) left three major questions open in its wake: (a) the viability of religious moral sources in a ‘secular’ age; (b) the compatibility between a robust moral realism and a genealogical account of modern identity; (c) the meaning and destiny of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. This is the framing topic of his last book. Although Taylor’s variety of hermeneutics is unquestionably (...) a product of the linguistic turn, he has operated with a broad notion of the linguistic capacity from the start. Language is, for him, a shared activity and the acknowledgment of its animal embeddedness functions in his work as an antidote against any too idealized a view of the kind of creatures that humans are. In his earlier writings, however, a structural tension lurked below the surface between a Gadamerian notion of Sprache and a more phenomenological, Merleau-Pontyan, embodied outlook that was less modeled on articulate speech. My claim is that his new book marks a shift from a more speech-oriented to a more body-oriented understanding of language. (shrink)

If, following Masuzawa, Fitzgerald and others we assume that “the religious” is a category produced by Western colonial regimes in tandem with that of “the secular,” then consequently the post-secular would need to be post-religious, as well. Here I demonstrate how in one metropolitan case, Germany, the religious and secular divide is evoked to produce a particular exclusivist narrative of national identity. A substantial part of German civil society, media, and legal establishment mobilize an imagined culturally Christian vision of Germany (...) in order to exclude from public visibility and political participation German born Muslims of Turkish descent. The colonial twin categories of secular-religious still operate in the shaping of the German polity. Decolonizing it would thus require not only to enter a post-secular dialogue with religious presentations in the public sphere, as Habermas contends; rather a post-secular polity would require the post-religious. (shrink)

This article examines the resources offered by various forms of critical cultural theory for the study of religion. It then briefly explores the turn to religion by a range of recent cultural theorists.

This essay, between serious and facetious, addresses an apparently secondary implication of the planetary tragedy produced by Covid-19. It coincides with the ‘problem of the veil,’ a bone of contention in Islam/West relationships. More specifically, it will address the question of why the pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of ‘living together.’ For some time—and it is not possible to foresee how much—in many countries people cannot go out, or enter any public places, without wearing (...) a sanitary mask. In short, almost all of us, by obligation or by urgent advice from the public authorities of the various countries, will not live the public sphere with our faces uncovered. The alteration of the social context affecting many Western countries will inevitably involve also the ‘local’ perception of the Islamic veil and—as a matter of equality—the consistency of the prohibition of wearing it. What will thus become of the ban on wearing it in public places established by some countries such as France and asseverated by the ECHR? If everyone can and will have to go around with their faces covered, why should only Islamic women be discriminated against? Will not the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce Western people to re-categorize the meaning of the veil? And will this re-categorization not directly affect the ‘fact’ of wearing the veil, that is, its empirical perception? And still, will this psycho-semantic change not show how empirical perceptions are cultural constructs rather than ‘objective facts,’ as such allegedly independent from the observer’s point of view? Consequentially, will the plurality of perceptions and cultural meanings related to the gesture of covering one’s own face not gain renewed relevance in determining the legitimacy of wearing the veil? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid-19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of ‘facts’ into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many ideological/partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged ‘facts.’ The essay will attempt to provide an answer to the above questions by proposing a semiotic-legal approach to intercultural conflicts and, indirectly, the pluralism in law. (shrink)

This article examines the Islamic concept of takfīr as it is used in secular-pluralistic contexts, within a larger delegitimizing discourse against terrorism. I argue that this takfīr as deployed by “liberal” Muslims, functions to legitimate the state’s use of coercive force. Furthermore, the secular state may in turn draw upon these discourses to co-opt the right to determine authentic Muslim identity. However, in doing so the state is forced to enter into a religiously discursive space. Takfīr notably becomes the site (...) of contention over secular state sovereignty for determining the value of life, where religious individuals both challenge and affirm this sovereignty. This reveals the dynamics in the relationship between secular conceptions of sovereignty and religion, as it pertains to the justification of violence. (shrink)

The argument of this article assumes that religious literacy is urgently needed in the present geopolitical context. Its urgency increases the more religion is viewed in opposition to criticality, as though religion entails an irrational and inviolable commitment, or leap of faith. This narrow view of religion is reinforced by certain rather dogmatic secular framings of religion, which require any and all forms of religious expression to be excluded from public life. Excluding religion from the public has the unfortunate effect (...) that religiosity can take extreme forms with little social mediation through political deliberative cultures. Such approaches do not support religious literacy, but tend to generate increasingly polarized and fractured debates about the place of religion in society and education. In contrast to the attitude that seeks to privatize religion, I argue that religions are fundamentally public facing, not least because they act as social institutions that bind communities together. I argue that it is the hermeneutical traditions immanent to religions themselves that must inform the ways that religions can appropriately inform public life. (shrink)

Introduction to the Special Issue: A Matter of Interactions—Religion and Architectural Modernism, 1945–70.

Originally published as L'Islam et l'occident, 2006. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. xxii + 114 pp. Hardback, $19.99.

In A Secular Age Charles Taylor endorses Mikhail Epstein’s notion of ‘minimal religion’ as his preferred orientation to the good for Western secular society. This article examines the basis of Epstein’s ‘minimal religion’ which rests on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It is shown that Freud’s theories are incompatible with Taylor’s own thought, and in the case of Jung, Epstein fails to develop the latter’s contribution to our understanding of religion. Moreover, although Taylor endorses Epstein’s work (...) he makes no reference to Jung. To this end, the importance of Jung’s theories in relation to religion are elucidated and offered as a way to forge a dialogue between a nuanced humanist position and the theistic vision offered by Taylor. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the prospects for thoroughly secular thought. It does so in relation to recent theories of secularization (and especially Charles Taylor’s and Hans Blumenberg’s) as well as by attending to two very different intellectual projects, one mounted by Jeremy Bentham (in particular his concept of felicity or happiness), the other by Michael Oakeshott. It argues that Bentham’s utilitarian account of happiness depends on a Christian conceptual structure, and that Oakeshott’s understanding of philosophy as a practice of questioning (...) presents a brighter hope for thoroughly secular thought. (shrink)

Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into heated debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to criticisms of the moral worth of their (...) research. The article outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive framing to incorporate existing research without being subject to critique; and (3) navigating through the debate by devising new research directions that do not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations, and have switched among several diverse moral justifications to address—and also avoid—criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality. (shrink)

This article explores the differences between Marcel Gauchet and Charles Taylor with respect to their theories of secularization. It starts by looking at their resemblances; it continues by distinguishing a two-fold difference in their approach. The variation within their similar methodologies is examined, and then the consequences of these divergent definitions of religion are investigated. We focus on four themes: the role of the Axial religions, the significance of Incarnation and Reformation, the significance of Christianity as the ‘religion of the (...) departure from religion’, and the possibility of religious ‘conversion’. Taylor's and Gauchet's views on the future of religion diverge as a function of their different interpretations of ‘fulfilment’ and ‘hunger for meaning’. (shrink)